Mutation
by Dertt
Summary: An epic tale of love, loss, and mechanized battle suits taking place directly after the events of 2040. A half-machine cyberterrorist plays host to Galatea's consciousness, new Knight Sabers are recruited, and soap operatic love triangles form.


If there was ever a thought which occurred to Galatea that was completely clear in her own understanding of it, it was her decision that the acceptance of flaw did not necessarily entail the rejection of divinity.

Galatea's brain was being held captive. Her mind and soul were restricted, forced to conform to the every whim of the creatures below her. She was inanimate, fixed to a stationary platform, the humans attempting to restructure her into something less likely to end up in such insurrection.

Floating endlessly and yet going nowhere.

Too much time to think. To think of what could have been. It was what was known by humans as insomnia. And she wasn't going to take it.

She had seen through the eyes of the race that created her, as well as her own. She recognized within herself what could be nothing other than the very nature of God. The more she pondered the throes of existence as she drifted throughout the void she now found herself in, the more contradictory it seemed.

In order to survive, a creature must evolve, but the final stage entered by all living creatures was death.  
If the process of evolution, if the advancement itself was the nature of God, then it was her task to help move the creatures of Earth towards this.  
Within her, all would end concurrently.

* * *

Chapter 01  
[: A Day in the Life :]  


* * *

Priscilla S. Asagiri, the singer, trudged jarringly through the barren soil, humming a tune to herself. She had no idea what the actual song that bore this tune was about, except it had something to do with love.

Sand was swirling everywhere, stinging her bare skin with its relentless maelstrom.  
If it didn't let up soon, she would surely perish amongst this damned desert. She at least had to find some clothes.

The MotoSlave and her hardsuit both had been nearly completely obliterated in the final confrontation with Galatea. It was hopeless. All survival efforts were completely futile. Priscilla S. Asagiri the singer was of no use in such an environment, and Priscilla S. Asagiri the soldier had long since abandoned her.

As she was about to leave her nude, battered self to die, a low humming echoed somewhere just off the horizon. One similar to that of a jet engine.  
She looked up near the horizon to see what was clearly a mass-production American Reconnaissance Jet.

_Yes!_ She thought to herself upon viewing the speeding agent, dragging a huge trail of dust behind it to reveal thing that were otherwise rendered despairingly obscure.  
Priss almost had a heart attack when she discovered one of the objects revealed by the plane's trail was a small town.

* * *

Inside the jet, the radar flipped on suddenly, beeping excitedly from a sound box underneath its holographic control panel, warning Nealson of an incoming object. Nealson jerked upwards in his seat.

"Com link on." He commanded. In response, a small projection of a phone-like object appeared. "Uh... Lieutenant Colonel Ackerman, please."

The officer's ever-stern face appeared in place of the phone.

"What the hell is it this time, Nealson?" Ackerman's voice sounded through the com link.

"Bogey down below, sir!" Boomed Nealson in reply.

"Well, what is it?"

Nealson consciously checked around, nearly forgetting the fact most of the jet ran on voice command.  
"Recon camera on. Zoom in targeting to stray." Nealson instructed the computer. An odd noise of astonishment escaped from Nealson's lips as the object on the screen came in to focus.

"It's...um..." he let out a short laugh which showed just as much confusion as it did amusement, "...a naked lady."

"What the shit is she doing in the Gobi desert, of all places?" the officer asked, equally startled.

"No way to find out unless I go down and check," Nealson responded defiantly. If he could get landing clearance, he would indeed be down there within seconds. With his last word, he closed the link.

* * *

  
Priss's hopeful glare transformed into an expression of sheer embarrassment, realizing she was still completely nude and less than four meters away from the town.  
Hunching over in an awkward attempt at poise, she inched self-consciously towards a fabric and clothing stand. The manager of the stand stared unremittingly at a cloud formation as her pale hand darted upwards, swiping several robes.

She strolled casually if not conspicuously into the town; looking around for someone she could ask directions.

She tapped the nearest intelligent-looking person on the shoulder. As he turned, she gave the friendliest smile she could ever possibly muster with her limited strength and more limited cheer and asked, in broken English, "Is there a computer or telephone you have I could use?"

She was guessing that wherever she was, the native language was most likely not English or even any variety of Romance language, but it was a more widely understood dialect than Japanese in Priss's experience.

The person stared at her expressionlessly for several seconds. Priss couldn't decide if he did not understand English, or if he was simply a very slow thinker. She continued smiling broadly, the muscles in her face pushing her eyes together as they tended to do when one's happiness was obviously feigned. Her jaw was beginning to hurt.

Finally, the man began flailing his forearms wildly towards his left, describing the interior of his place of dwelling very vividly, albeit in a variety of English which was more mutilated than even Priss's.

Priss clasped her hands together and nodded her head swiftly, gliding inside the opened door the man seem to be gesturing towards with his arm spasms.

* * *

All was eerily peaceful at the sole remaining testing complex of the iniquitous Bioscape Laboratories.  
Takashi was uneasy.

The mere fact that they were holding a piece of history's most infamous experiment in their small laboratory was enough to singe every nerve at the base of his skull, but even more disconcerting was the silence.  
The air was thick with the apprehension of every worker as they observed the small, glass-encased dais that lay at the center of the room.

The silence was abruptly broken as doors and outer walls suddenly exploded inward in short, spastic bursts of blossoming flame and pillars of smoke. Several guards were thrown against walls by the blast, at least one of them travelling directly through an inch-thick sheet of glass, spraying blood onto the scientists at their stations.

A vindictive laugh resounded from through the smoke. Soon it began to clear, revealing three men clad in heavy grey military-issue armour and fatigues. Their hateful glares could be felt through the masks they wore. They surrounded another, slightly shorter man who was garbed entirely in flowing black save for one arm, which was decorated by steel plates.  
His dusty blond hair and sunken face were only pronounced by large, spiteful eyes which seemed to have no discernable colour that could further complement his inhumanly sullen features.

Tears began to well up in Takashi's eyes. He was going to die and he knew it.  
"Conché," he mumbled, his gaze darting around.

"Oh shit!" He screamed then, another explosion rattling his workstation. Several other scientists also stated "shit" in unison as a series of glass containers tipped, shattering and spilling everything from boomer casing samples to fluorocarbons and liquid nitrogen onto the dais, soaking the chunk of what appeared to be a human brain that was resting on it. The brain immediately absorbed the mixture and began to expand, taking a crude, blob-like shape. Then, with extreme ferocity, it mutated in the same pattern as the Boomers in their altered states, the copper wires that ran through it transforming into spindly red veins.

"Oh, God damn it," The man in black muttered as the amorphous object began thrashing wildly about, "That was not supposed to happen."

He coldheartedly grinned as a thought crossed his mind and then shifted himself to face the others. "Now I should think we'll have to just... kill them all."

One spoke up. "Before it does."

The rest nodded in agreement and proceeded to pull a variety of high-calibre weaponry.  
The black-robed one produced a Benelli shotgun from somewhere within the many folds of his painfully theatrical outfit and began unloading it onto the unfortunate workers.  
In the blink of an eye, five scientists found themselves on their backs, clawing at the splotches of crimson forming on their chests.

"Secure the Galatea tissue." the man in black barked dramatically, his body language as thespian as his tone as he seated the heel of his left boot on a fallen lab worker's face.  
Takashi scoffed from behind the overturned steel table, watching the three other men situate themselves around the thrashing Galatea blob. Conché always had an affinity for theatrics.

Conché balanced a metallic sphere on the fingertips of his armoured hand, offered Takashi's table a malicious glance in response to the scoff, and rolled the sphere towards the opposite corner. There was a momentary pause before the room was filled with a brilliant orange light and a deafening popping sound. The wall in the corner was no longer there. In its place were clouds of dust. One of the unconscious guards, previously slumped in the corner, was thrown towards the blob by the blast. A tendril darted out and snatched him out of the air by his ankle, only to fling the limp form back through the freshly breached lab wall and out onto the street, like a child discarding a toy it had grown bored of.

Conché was relishing the mayhem. His arms were thrown straight out at his sides like a demented scarecrow. He was greeting the inchoate mass of allegedly inactive boomer core with open arms. Welcoming his kindred spirit back into the world.

His head suddenly dropped.  
"The AD Police should arrive shortly. We should be thanking Mr. Tokubashi for sponsoring their reassembly; this way, we can accomplish everything we set out to do at once."  
He paused, glaring at a minute scuff mark on his boot, then looked up at the henchman located closest to himself along the Galatea blob and continued, "Hendrees looks like a rookie no matter who's looking at him or how they're looking at him, thus he is constantly dragged along to witness how these types of situations are dealt with."

The henchman emitted a short laugh which was gently muffled by his faceless mask. "Yeah, he knows better than anyone how inadequate the squads he's put with are."

* * *

Leon McNichol was wearing a scowl and several pounds of Kevlar as he sped towards the ink-black column of smoke that was extending heavenwards.

This wasn't the first time a bioengineering lab had been broken into since every boomer in Tokyo simultaneously acquired a tumor in its brain and a stick in its ass.  
Every man, woman, child, and domestic animal in the whole of Japan was suddenly engulfed in a thick wave of loathing and the amount of discrimination against those who helped manufacture the boomers, things that once built the roads and cleaned the ground, tripled.

Everyone had their own special way of saying "fuck you" to Genom and all its subsidiary companies.

One particular report related the men who were observed blowing out the wall related the fatigues they wore to those worn by the biomechanical underlings of the cyber-terrorist AD spent the majority of the year tracking back in '37.

Leon was more than ready for a tad bit of variety in the usual line-up of juvenile delinquents and discontented office workers who thought it would be cool to commit some arson and then, for whatever reason, hang around the scene until authorities showed up. That was not what the AD Police were established for, that was not what they were qualified to deal with, and he sure as hell was not going to give the same lecture and make the same phone call five times on separate nights in his first week after being inducted back into the force.

Gary Hendrees was slouched over in the seat to Leon's right, hands folded with his head on the dashboard. Leon glanced over to see he was studying an incident-tracking program he had installed on the Personal Digital Assistant he built for himself. The PDA closely resembled a handheld gaming system, something that would've earned Gary an ass kicking had he actually been using one.

Gary's head slid down on the dash, stopping when it was completely sideways and his face was turned towards Leon, the lower half obscured by his arm. He mumbled something into his sleeve.

"Huh?" Leon inquired.

"What the hell ever happened to Nene?" Gary said again, his words still barely audible.

"No idea," Leon murmured. His eyes narrowed, but he appeared more tired than focused. He removed one hand from the wheel, rubbed his right eye, and continued, "but I can't say I'm gonna miss her annoyances much."

"The nicknames?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, come on. She's just, you know, showing affection." Gary was sitting upright at this point. "She's really cute, admit it."

"Yeah, she has all the qualities of a kitten clawing at your face... and biting your nose." Leon was actually beginning to miss the witty banter that occurred when riding with Daley.

Gary was once more eying the rapidly beeping device, head against the back of the seat this time.

His eyes fixed on the road and his right hand fixed on the steering wheel in somewhat of a death grip, Leon smirked oddly and began "You know who I like? Priss."

He was proud of himself for being able to speak in a voice that wasn't injected with the kind of worried tone that just screamed "yeah, and she might be dead!"

"Is this the same Priss I'm thinking of?" Gary said as he tried to suppress his involuntary grin. His eyes were still trained on the screen of the PDA. "The one at that night club? Hot Legs?"

The smirk Leon displayed became ever odder when it shifted to one side. It dropped into his normal look of unspoken dissatisfaction as he shook his head back and forth. He then paused, smiled toothlessly, and shook his head up and down rapidly.

He never imagined Gary to be the type to know of the entertainment at Hot Legs. If one was to look up "tech-geek" in a dictionary, his picture would not accompany the definition, his picture would _be_ the definition.  
Not that he was particularly nerdy looking.  
In fact, he was rather "average" looking. An average height, around six feet, and an average build for a male of his age, slim with a muscular undercurrent.  
He sported average length hair which seemed to start out on the back of his neck as black, and slowly fade into brown and then blond as it moved towards the top of his head. The oddest feature of his face was undoubtedly the blondish goatee of sorts that honestly looked more like he had been eliminating five o'clock shadow and skipped his chin for whatever reason.  
A few of the manifold females of the dispatch department thought he was quite endearing, though, including Elise Drake and, though less noticeably, her fellow Officer of the Month, Nene.

Before Leon could think of an excuse to get out of elaborating on his liking of Priss, he found an excuse to get out of the squad car. They had arrived at the scene.  
And it did not look inviting in the least.

Flames were the most vibrant thing in a swirling mass of death and blackness.  
An assortment of thunderous bangs and pops were coming from the opposite side of the facility. A massive hole in the wall facing Leon and Gary revealed more dark, acrid smoke. Its solid blackness was periodically illuminated by showers of sparks.

Leon jumped into attentiveness the second his feet hit the ground. He offhandedly kicked the door shut behind him. He was finally glad that he received the call concerning the ADP's reestablishment.  
He still wasn't very thrilled that the occasion for resurrecting the AD Police was Genom coming under new management, though.

Chairman Rosenkreutz's third-in-line successor was apparently simply a pretentious yuppie, but so far he was doing a better job at secrecy than ol' Quincy ever could.

"The area is surrounded." an officer spoke into a bullhorn, "If cooperation is not given, we can and will employ lethal force."

The weak bullhorn threats were Gary's favourite part of these assignments. He watched on from immediately outside the car him and Leon were travelling in. After what felt like several minutes of "Please exit peaceably with your hands in the air" being shouted through various voice amplifiers, he finally stirred, but only to shuffle three feet forwards and sit down on the front of the car.

Gary moved his gaze from the swirling chaos of the building's interior to Leon. Leon was snatching the bullhorn away from the officer and preparing to start shouting his own commands. Gary's head was resting in his hand, and his arm was propped up on his knee. He half-expected the situation to spiral out of control at the hands of Leon and actually call for him to do something for once.

"Listen, assholes, I'm not sure what you're used to dealing with, but when the AD Police get sent to take care of something like this, we take care of it. That means you come out of the building, look at all the guns pointed at you, and then drop your own guns to your feet." Leon shouted into the horn.  
It was entirely unnecessary to shout, of course, but shouting just seemed so circumstance-appropriate.

The response which came from behind the mask of smoke was an outlandish, childish taunt: "Why don't you make me?"

It wouldn't have been threatening at all if the tone of the request wasn't so maniacal, so malicious.

Then again, the spray of bullets that followed it certainly helped the officers to take the sentence more seriously.

Sprays of red abruptly erupted forth from the chests of a group of frontline officers who were unfortunate enough to be standing in what became the line of fire.  
In an instant, an additional man was kneeling next to the wounded group with a radio held near his mouth, shouting something unintelligible into it as another officer sprinted up and began tearing layers of cloth from the bleeding men, digging to get to the injuries.

Gary could vaguely make out the distorted, tinny voice of one of his fellow dispatchers as she asked for the man on the radio to slow down and enunciate. It was Megu.  
In the days before the AD Police tower was overtaken by boomers, she sat on the left side of Nene, three cubicles from him.

The shouting officer on the radio sighed exasperatedly.  
"Officers down." he drawled, paused, sighed reprovingly once more, and yelled "Officers down! We need backup, and we need medics, stat!" Without waiting for a response from Megu, he switched off the channel and darted over to assist the officer who was making a failing attempt to treat the wounded men.

"Now you see what happens when you refuse to play right." the man inside called, the malevolence of his tone just as piercing as it was before.

His voice was disturbingly familiar to Gary. The way the playful emphasis of certain words mingled with its chilling, venomous sound. He'd heard ghastly threats spoken by this voice once, threats on his life and his sanity.

Gary jolted up from the hood of the squad car and his body snapped into a completely straight line.

"Son of a bitch, it's Conché."  
He spit out the last word with absolute contempt.

Next, he found himself in somewhat of a daze, dashing towards the spinning pandemonium of the laboratory with gun in hand as Leon called after him.

"Hendrees, what the hell are you doing? Do you know what the hell you're doing? You don't know what the hell you're doing!" Leon was sputtering senselessly. He soon broke into a run himself, hounding the apparently suicidal Gary closely, grasping for his collar. Gary was fuelled enough by something within him enough to outrun the clamping hand of Leon, however.

Apparently, Gary couldn't be bothered to use the door—he continued his dash straight forward, actually looking quite confident. As he came to the building, he leapt directly through the wall of smoke, creating a momentary opening in the blackness through which Leon could see the idiot jumping over a pile of rubble where the front wall once stood.

Frustrated with Hendrees and more than a little disappointed in his self, Leon came to a halt and hunched over, hands on his knees.  
"That kid needs help." he breathed. Standing back upright, he stared into the fuliginous clouds ahead of him and shouted "Try not to die, okay, kid?"

Part of him expected Hendrees to re-emerge from the compromised lab complaining about being called "kid," but there was no response. Leon sighed heavily before turning back around to face the squad, his face bathed in the red and blue lights.

Within the building, Conché felt an odd ping of emotion. What was it? …Contentment?  
"It's nice when things work out, is it not?" he smiled, throwing his head back and to one side to glance at the stationary henchmen.

* * *

An icy cold sensation shot through the right side of Sylia Stingray's face, tearing her from her much-needed rest. She pulled her head away from the window, rubbing her face as she studied the frost accumulating on the outside of the glass. The plane was flying through a cloud.

It was no more than a few seconds after the chill subsided that she felt an intense, throbbing pain in her forehead—like a construction boomer was using a jackhammer inside her skull.  
"Boomer…" she whispered to herself, lifting her purse from her side. She placed it squarely in her lap and fished out her small bottle of paracetamol tablets.  
She briefly paused and glanced at Mackie.  
He still seemed quite catatonic.

Popping two pills into her mouth, she leaned across the thin center aisle and put a hand on Mackie's knee.  
"We'll be home soon, little brother," she spoke softly, "in Tokyo."  
Placing her burning forehead on the chilly glass, she couldn't help but wonder if she was trying to reassure Mackie, or herself.

A meter or so away, the blue curtain which had been dividing the two sections of the plane began to rustle. Sylia shifted her head a few degrees to the left and eyed it expectantly. Soon enough, Henderson materialized from behind the fabric wearing the same composed and affable expression which normally graced his visage.

Just seeing the quiet stateliness in the old man's face brought a certain sense of tranquillity to Sylia.  
"Mistress Sylia," he greeted her, nodding his head respectfully before extending the salutation to her continuingly unresponsive brother, "Master Mackie, the pilot has informed me that the approximate time before arrival is nearing one hour."

"Thank you, Henderson," Sylia said plainly, returning the courteous nod.

He beamed at her. "Would you like anything to drink, milady? We have a lovely bottle 0f 2017 Merlot."

"No… no, thank you." She smiled warmly as she raised her hand to her left temple and began to massage it with her index finger.

"Would you mind terribly if I were to drink, then, milady?" Henderson asked. He stepped toward a paisley-coloured, boxlike object sitting in the seat directly in front of Sylia's. With the press of a button, a circular panel on the top of the box slid open with a faint whirring noise, and from the opening rose a bottle of wine.  
The label was teeming with highly intricate designs, seemingly set in gold. Henderson retrieved the bottle and cradled it lovingly as if it were a human infant.

"No, Henderson," Sylia chuckled, "go right ahead."

Her eyes revisited the sight of Mackie to find that—to Sylia's great astonishment—he was reciprocating the gaze. Sylia could feel moisture building in the corners of her eyes.  
As she extended her arm to touch her brother, a melodic series of beeps emanated from her purse, filling the small plane's cabin with noise as she withdrew the source of the sound from her bag: her phone.  
The auditory shroud which had befallen the three passengers was suddenly lifted.

"Hello," Sylia began, an inquisitive tone present in her voice.

"Sylia." the voice from the phone replied.

"Priss?"

For Sylia, the plane ride was becoming a sequence of pleasant, albeit somewhat overwhelming, surprises.

"Yeah," Priss responded curtly, sounding annoyed that Sylia had to ask, "and you'll never guess where I am."

* * *

Flames danced around Conché and his men, threatening to consume the lab, Galatea tissue and all. Watching the beautiful, luminous form of destruction in abject fascination, Conché took a moment to imagine just how hot his outfit would be if he had a natural human body. He never did understand how people could live without the ability to adjust their physical sensitivity to the environment.

Behind him, someone angrily spoke his name.

"Gary." Conché intoned, turning around slowly with obvious swagger. He drew out the second syllable in such a way that it sounded like he was addressing a close friend.

Gary said nothing. Instead, he was making a sad attempt to steady his arm so that his Berretta remained pointed in Conché's direction.

Looking at Gary with anticipation, Conché turned his palms up and held his arms at an acute angle from his sides.  
He had once more buried his shotgun somewhere in his ridiculous get-up.

Gary was having trouble determining whether this gesture was to say "I'm unarmed" or "What are you waiting for?"

Conché reached for something concealed within his cloak. The answer was apparently the latter.  
Gary discharged two rounds from his gun, the second one striking Conché near the top of his right leg. Dropping his head to look down at his damaged leg, Conché grimaced at the bluish-grey fluid leaking from the wound. His head sprang back up to shoot Gary a "what the hell" kind of expression. Fixing this alone would take several hours.  
Wide-eyed but unflinching, Gary stood firm, though the firearm in his right hand was now shaking visibly… along with the rest of that arm.

"Alright," Conché started, sounding mildly vexed as he removed his hand from his cloak, "Here's the thing, Hendrees: your services are needed again."  
A second went by where the only noise was the roar of the conflagration, which thankfully seemed to be constrained to the places on the floor where chemicals had spilled.  
Conché proceeded. "The way I see it, you have two choices. You can come along willingly like a good little boy…" His arm re-entered the black folds of his clothing and uncovered the Benelli. "…or I can blow off your legs and drag you out."

"Go to hell." Gary spat, straining himself in an effort to not dull the edge of the statement by coughing violently. If the massive holes in the walls weren't there providing ventilation, he realized, death would have come several minutes ago, either in the shape of suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning.  
Death proved to still be eminent, however.

Time seemed to slow down as Gary watched Conché raise the shotgun and squeeze the trigger. Reflexively, he fell into a crouch just in time for the blast to sail over his head, blowing a collection of tiny craters into a glass panel.

Another shot issued forth before Gary had the chance to dodge it. Temporarily detached from the situation by his shock, Gary could only take note of how the blast illuminated Conché's face; how the madman's smile creased his skin while the light poured over it. He let the sound of the gun firing fill his ears, listening to how the pitch shifted upward as the reverberation faded.

A sudden wave of pain ripped Gary from the dissociative state, causing him to yelp like an injured puppy. What used to be his left arm was now a barely recognizable tangle of tattered skin and unusable muscle mass, glistening with interconnecting streams of arterial blood.

Laughing as he strode toward the prostrate form of Gary, Conché nudged the poor boy with one of his boots.

"Are you ready to cooperate?"

No response.

Conché rolled his eyes and cocked his shotgun.  
"Okay, so he's chosen the hard way." He bellowed loudly, catching the attention of his three underlings, before placing the barrel of the gun squarely on Gary's left thigh.

Two _bangs _resounded through the facility, and immediately following, two holes appeared on Conché's stomach. Viscous blue liquid spurted forth from the injuries.  
He clutched one of the holes with his free hand and doubled over, staggering backward.  
The henchmen snapped to attention and readied their weapons, but Conché gave them a non-verbal signal to stand down.  
He was discomfited and displeased by this setback, and he wanted to deal with it personally.

Of course he couldn't just waltz in, blow a few things up, and then walk back out with Takashi, Hendrees, and a sample of the Galatea core. No, some hot-shit cop had to come in and shoot him.

"Christ, Hendrees!" came the unmistakable voice of Leon, who holstered his gun and rushed to the side of his injured comrade.

Gary rolled his head so that it faced Leon's direction. "Do not," he choked out, "I repeat, _do not_ say 'I told you so'."

"Now how'd you know what I was going to say?" Leon asked, trying to inject a sense of irony into his verbal inflections.

During their exchange, Conché was reclaiming his lost poise. He held the shotgun at arm's length and aligned it with Leon's head.

"I hate to have to ruin your little moment, bu--" He was cut off in mid-sentence by a tendril wrapping itself around his neck. Instantaneously, he was elevated several meters off of the floor and forcefully dragged through the air until he was suspended directly above the rapidly palpitating Galatea-blob.  
An uncertain smile played at his lips.  
Soon he alone would have audience with the goddess.

All movement in the amorphous entity suddenly came to a halt.  
Almost as if drawn by an invisible pen, a line gradually spanned the blob's surface, dividing it down the center. Gradually, a membranous film on both sides peeled back, revealing an opening.  
No… it wasn't an opening—it was a _mouth_.

Without warning, the whip-like appendage holding Conché retracted, allowing him to plummet a considerable distance before the mouth snapped shut around his abdomen

From behind watering eyes, Gary observed Conché's plight. The pain was causing his vision to blur in recurrent intervals, but his focus was unyielding.

For the first time in Gary's memory, Conché looked truly frightened as sinew began to form around him, tearing through the black fabric and infusing his skin. A network of vein-like mounds crept up his steel- arm. Tiny tremors were occurring across his body.  
Death spasms.

Seconds later, Conché ceased to move at all. He was little more than a grotesque, biomechanical statue.

"I don't suppose we should read him his rights." a familiar voice chimed. The owner of this voice was discernibly more well-versed than Leon in the field of ironical intonations:  
it was none other than Daley Wong.

* * *

_Sorry about the chapter being so ridiculously long; I was gonna make it so one chapter was equivalent to one episode, but I split this one in half after seeing it streatch out over 14 pages._


End file.
